1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of contact centers and, more particularly, to implementing a contact center using open standards and non-proprietary components.
2. Description of the Related Art
A contact center is a functional area used by one or more organizations to handle inbound/outbound communications with customers. A contact center can facilitate real-time communications that use different interactive modalities, such as voice (e.g., telephone interactions), text (e.g., chat modalities), video, and Web (e.g., co-browsing). Contact centers utilize automated response components that automatically handle routine customer functions, such as providing account balances and the like. Automated response components can also determine subject matter of a customer communication, can ascertain a currently working human contact center agent having requisite skills to handle the customer's needs, and can automatically and dynamically route the customer to that human agent for an interactive communication.
Conventionally, contact centers are implemented using proprietary infrastructure resources (e.g., hardware and software) from vendors. For example, a typical contact center has a dedicated switch, has specialized telephones for agents, has a hardwired computer telephone interface (CTI) between switch and computer equipment, and utilizes proprietary protocols to link infrastructure components. These proprietary solutions have normal proprietary advantages and disadvantages.
One advantage to vendors is that customers are basically locked into a provided solution due to a cost for changing a complete infrastructure from one vendor to a competitor, since vendor solutions are currently incompatible with each other. One disadvantage is that proprietary solutions are often unable to rapidly integrate technological innovations or at least incur substantial cost when adding functionality that takes advantage of new innovations. In a contact center context, new innovations can include software/firmware improvements in VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technologies, media streaming, speech processing, and the like. Hardware innovations, such as feature enhanced telephone and computing terminals, can also be hard for proprietary solutions to utilize due to proprietary communication protocols and hardware links. Solutions which are based upon open standards are able to quickly and cheaply take advantage of new innovations. Further, maintaining skill currency of employees is much less expensive for open solutions than for proprietary solutions. From a customer perspective, current contact center providers are often slow to respond to customer desired improvements (due to proprietary implementation quirks), can be very expensive, and can lack a desired degree of flexibility.
The following example, shown in FIG. 1 (Prior Art), illustrates a conventional implementation of a contact center. FIG. 1 (Prior Art) shows a system 100 where a contact node 105 accesses a contact center implemented using a proprietary architecture 160. The contact node 105 generally consists of a customer using a telephone to dial a telephone number for the contact center. Communications occur over network 150, which can be a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), and are received by a pubic branch exchange (PBX) 110. The PBX 110 routes incoming calls to contact center system implemented using proprietary architecture 160.
Various components can be linked to one another within the proprietary architecture 160 including a Voice Response Unit (VRU) server 120, a computer and telephony integration server (CTI) 126, a workflow manager 128, and an operations center 140. The VRU 120 provides automated voice interactions for callers, which can be provided by speech enabled applications 122 executing on a linked application server 124. The VRU server 120 can be a proprietary solution, which can require speech enabled applications 122 be written in a proprietary language and/or in a proprietary manner.
The CTI server 126 can provide access to enterprise system 127 information, and can be responsible for populating data fields based upon customer input. CTI server 126 can also distribute inbound calls. When calls are routed, the CTI server 126 can ensure that an agent 145 is presented with information, which the caller provided to the VRU server 120. Two key factors in allocating an agent to a caller are skills based routing and queuing. In skills based routing, the agent 145 assigned to a caller needs to have the requisite skills to resolve the customer's problems. In queuing, a caller's wait time should be minimized and incoming calls should be balanced between available agents 145 with appropriate skills.
The workflow manager 128 can track agent availability, can monitor agent/caller interactions, and can acquire and manage metrics for the interactions. The operations center 140, which is often remotely located from a data center, can include a set of agent nodes 144 linked to a center server 142 through a local network 154. Each agent node 144 can include a work station for an agent 145 as well as hardware 146 and software 148. The hardware 146 can be propriety hardware that communicates with the center server 142 using proprietary protocols. The desktop software 148 can also be proprietary, which is designed for a specific vendor. The proprietary nature of the hardware 146 and software 148 generally prevents agents 145 from working off-site, such as from home.